“In November,” Tinh finally sputtered, “uh, last November, around Thanksgiving. There was a shooting in Georgia. I was there …” Hesitantly, in a disjointed fashion, Tinh proceeded to tell Kumor everything about the robbery of the Sun Wa Fine Jewelry store in Doraville, and the shooting of Odum Lim.
“Jesus,” exclaimed Kumor when Tinh had finished.
“Does this mean I gonna be in trouble?” asked Tinh.
Kumor was wondering the same thing. It probably meant that Tinh’s agreement with the King’s County District Attorney’s Office had just become null and void, since the agreement was predicated on Tinh’s having confessed to all criminal activities in which he played a role. Now, it appeared, he had not done so.
“Nah. Listen,” Kumor reassured Tinh, “don’t worry about it.”
Actually, Kumor wasn’t feeling that confident. He was going to have to inform his bosses. There were people in the D.A.’s office and elsewhere who would feel this was a clear indication that Tinh Ngo could not be trusted. Some might even want to terminate his services, prosecute him as an accomplice in this new crime, and throw him back into the Rikers Island shark tank.
For his part, Kumor was impressed with Tinh’s willingness to finally admit his role in the Georgia shooting. He saw how hard it had been for Tinh to relive this incident, to describe in detail how Lan Tran put the gun to Odum Lim’s head and pulled the trigger. The confession clearly represented a turning point.
Tinh had divulged his role in a serious felony.
Now, there was no turning back.
Chapter 10
In 1988, the year Dan Kumor joined ATF, the bureau had just begun to emerge from a long period of obscurity—an obscurity best characterized by a story told in law enforcement watering holes from Maine to California.
The story went like this: A massive task force of state and federal agents from numerous law enforcement agencies had just swept down on a noted drug kingpin in his palatial abode somewhere near Washington, D.C. The dealer looked up from his mounds of cocaine to find himself surrounded by the gun-toting lawmen. “Okay,” he remarked, seemingly unsurprised, “you got me.”
Each of the agents wore a dark blue windbreaker with bold yellow lettering designating their agency. The bad guy scanned the various jackets. “DEA. Yeah, okay, I expected you guys,” he grumbled. He looked at another jacket. “FBI. Yep.” He acknowledged lawmen from the U.S. Marshals, the Customs Department, and local Washington, D.C., police.
Then he saw a jacket marked ATF.
“ATF?” he asked incredulously. “Hey, no way. I paid my fuckin’ phone bill.”
The story may have been apocryphal, but the moral was not. For decades, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been saddled not only with an unwieldy, slightly ridiculous appellation, but with a mandate that had changed so often in the last two hundred years, even criminals might be confused.
The bureau was first instituted in 1791 as a tax-collection agency. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had imposed a new tax on “spirits,” an unpopular move that led to the great Whiskey Rebellion. More than a century later came Prohibition, and ATF’s responsibilities were expanded to include enforcement of the Volstead Act. Agents from the bureau raided bootlegging and moonshining operations, smashed stills, and played a significant role in battling underworld syndicates in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.
Prohibition proved to be a glorious era for ATF, with the bureau’s most famous agent, Eliot Ness, playing a key role in the eventual incarceration of big bad Al Capone. In 1933, passage of the Twenty-first Amendment not only brought about the repeal of Prohibition and a crashing end to the Roaring Twenties, but a diminished role for ATF for many decades to come.
While J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation reaped headlines throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties, ATF went about the unglamorous job of enforcing regulations relating to the now-sedate alcohol and tobacco industries. Worse, the agency was denied the status of a full-fledged law enforcement bureau, relegated to a division of the Internal Revenue Service.
The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 changed all that by establishing an unprecedented federal commitment toward fighting urban crime. The Gun Control Act, also enacted in 1968, created stricter licensing of the firearms industry. For the first time, certain types of bombings and arson were also established as federal crimes, all of which gave ATF a broader mandate and increased profile.
Unfortunately for ATF, its new status happened to coincide with the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon’s so-called War on Drugs, a call to arms later undertaken with great zeal by Presidents Reagan and Bush. By the mid-1980s, drug trafficking had become the most written-about criminal activity since bootlegging. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration became the new superheroes of law enforcement, surpassing even the FBI in the number of presidential citations received and lucrative book and movie deals pursued.
By the end of the decade, various arms of the Justice Department had staked out their territory. Most high-profile crime investigations involving Cosa Nostra were handled by the FBI. The DEA took on the Colombian drug cartels and major Latin American syndicates operating in the United States. This left a large segment of organized crime—a category people in law enforcement lumped under the heading “emerging crime groups”—open to any agency with the mandate and fortitude to make it its own.
When Dan Kumor first got involved in the Harlem-based Jamaican posse investigation in 1989, ATF had already established itself as the lead agency in the area of Jamaican gangs. A number of major federal cases were under way in Miami and New York against drug organizations run by Jamaican nationals, all of which had been initiated or augmented by ATF. Partly, this was due to the posses’ abundant affection for guns, which brought them under the purview of the firearms agency. But mostly it was because no other federal agency seemed to care. In the Jamaican underworld, there was no John Gotti or Manuel Noriega, superstar criminals whose prosecution and conviction could make an FBI or DEA agent’s career.
The same opportunities that allowed ATF to take the lead on Jamaican organized crime paved the way for its current involvement in the BTK investigation. Like the Jamaicans, the Vietnamese were relatively low on the criminal food chain. The fact that ATF had developed a new identity for itself as an agency willing to take on so-called underworld “fringe” groups meant that the BTK investigation would get high priority.
Dan Kumor was banking on this fact when he approached his bosses to tell them about Tinh Ngo’s revelation that he had “aided and abetted” the shooting of a jewelry store owner during a robbery in Georgia.
“Look,” Kumor told John Rossero, his supervisor. “So Timmy withheld information. Okay. But it’s not like we caught him in a lie. He was the one who came out with it. He was the one who decided, on his own, to tell the truth. I think it means the kid can be trusted.”
In another situation, in another agency, Tinh’s belated disclosure might have made him seem more trouble than he was worth. But Rossero and others in the chain of command recognized the importance of the investigation. They accepted Kumor’s position without argument.
Though Kumor had a surprisingly easy time getting his ATF bosses to back him up, he wasn’t about to tell Tinh that. “I really stuck my neck out for you on this one, Timmy,” Kumor chided Tinh a few days after his Georgia revelation. “I hope you won’t let me down.”
Tinh nodded deferentially, eager to please his new masters. “Yes, thank you,” he replied. “I not let you down.”
They were words similar to those he had used before—with David Thai, the other major authority figure in his life.
As far as Tinh was concerned, it didn’t really matter that he had aligned himself with ATF or the NYPD or any other agency from the vast acronym soup of American law enforcement. To a young Vietnamese immigrant in trouble with the powers-that-be, these agencies were virtually indistinguishable. Each
was composed mostly of hefty white males with neatly trimmed hair and a jocular, backslapping manner. Tinh liked Dan Kumor; he felt that he could be trusted. But that was not the reason he had decided to come clean about what transpired in Doraville.
It was while riding along the Long Island Expressway, when Kenny Vu made the offhand comment about Anh hai using him for target practice, that Tinh first came to a sobering realization about his new life as a government informant. Looking back, Tinh knew Kenny had been joking. Still, the incident made it clear that Tinh could not continue to walk the fence, keeping a foot in both camps without ever having to fully commit himself one way or the other. He could not cooperate with the government halfway—the danger of being discovered was too great. He needed a partner he could rely on. For better or for worse, that partner would have to be the United States government.
The thought that he would effectively be cutting himself off from the only social world he knew was troubling to Tinh, but it wasn’t long before he got some reassurance he’d made the right decision. On April 18, 1991, just a few days after his last meeting with Agent Kumor, Tinh was privy to a new act of BTK brutality. This time it was orchestrated by none other than David Thai himself.
Tinh was resting in a back bedroom at the BTK safe-house apartment at 810 Forty-fifth Street in Sunset Park when he heard a knock at the door.
“Timmy, come out. Anh hai is here,” requested a voice Tinh recognized as Shadow Boy’s.
Right away, Tinh knew something serious was up. In the four weeks he had been living in the cramped apartment, Thai had rarely made personal appearances.
Tinh walked into the front room, where David Thai was standing with a handful of other gang members. From another bedroom, Tinh could hear the sound of somebody crying. He looked to see LV Hong, the Canal Street dai low, hovering over Nigel Jagmohan, an associate of the gang whom Tinh knew only casually. Nigel was sitting in a chair with tears running down his face and blood trickling from his nose and mouth.
LV Hong smacked Nigel hard across the side of his head. “You motherfucker!” screamed LV. “Don’t lie to us or we gonna kill you!”
Tinh’s eyes opened wide. Oh shit, he thought, it’s finally going down.
Three days earlier, while Tinh was sitting in the apartment with some other gang members watching a Hong Kong action movie, Nigel and Shadow Boy had burst in the door, barely able to contain their excitement. They had just attempted a robbery on Canal Street and things apparently had not gone well.
Earlier that day, Nigel, Shadow Boy, and a third gang member, Johnny Huynh, had driven into Chinatown in a brown Chevy Impala. Johnny Huynh was the leader. He selected the jewelry store they were going to hit, a small stall near the back of the shopping mall at 263 Canal Street. Because the jewelry store was smack-dab in the middle of BTK territory and the robbery had not been authorized by any dai low, Johnny did not want any of them to be recognized. He told the robbers they would need to wear masks.
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, the three robbers, along with a girlfriend of Johnny’s named Cindy, stopped the car near the intersection of Howard and Crosby streets, directly behind the mall. Shadow Boy waited behind the wheel with the motor running. Cindy also stayed in the car.
Nigel Jagmohan and Johnny got out of the Impala and walked across the street to the rear entrance of the mall. Just inside a swinging glass door, they pulled nylon stockings over their heads. Johnny Huynh took a 9mm handgun out of his jacket pocket. “Let’s do it,” he said to Nigel.
The two bandits stormed into the shopping mall. The stall with the jewelry was near the back entrance, so they didn’t have far to run.
“Get out of the way,” Johnny shouted at the middle-aged Chinese shop owner, who was the only person guarding the jewelry display.
From that point on, almost everything went wrong. Nigel hopped over the glass counter and began scooping the jewelry into a black canvas bag. He looked up to see the store owner wrestling with Johnny, trying to get at his gun.
Bam! the gun sounded, echoing loudly throughout the mall.
Customers dove for cover. The bullet struck the store owner in his right index finger, but he kept tussling with Johnny. Nigel jumped back over the counter and ran for the rear door. Johnny broke free and followed.
Outside, Nigel and Johnny pulled off the nylon stockings and hustled into the car. Johnny jumped in the front with Shadow Boy, Nigel in the back with Cindy. Shadow Boy stepped on the gas and the Impala sped north on Crosby Street.
They had traveled barely one block when Shadow Boy swerved to miss an oncoming car and smashed head-on into a utility pole. The car wasn’t traveling fast enough to seriously injure the passengers, but everyone was rattled. From the street and sidewalk, stunned pedestrians looked on as Nigel, Shadow Boy, and Cindy stumbled out of the car into the afternoon sunlight.
An off-duty prison guard from Rikers Island happened to be driving by. He stopped, got out of his car, and approached the crippled Impala. Instinctively, Shadow Boy pointed his 9mm at the guard, and they began wrestling over the gun. Cindy disappeared. Nigel ran and flagged down a taxi. Shadow Boy dropped the gun and also ran. Johnny, meanwhile, had been pinned inside the car when it collided with the pole. He was arrested by cops arriving on the scene.
Since the robbery had taken place on Canal Street in the middle of BTK territory, word spread fast. Both David Thai and LV Hong were livid. Not only had neither of them authorized this half-assed attempted robbery, but the black canvas bag full of jewelry was never recovered. Apparently, somebody had absconded with the loot!
When Tinh Ngo first heard about the incident, he knew there was going to be trouble. The day after the robbery, Tinh and two members from the Brooklyn faction of the BTK ran into LV Hong on Canal Street.
“Where’s the gold?” LV asked Tinh and the others. At the time, Nigel Jagmohan was also living at the small apartment on Forty-fifth Street.
“Nigel say he leave the gold behind,” answered Tinh. “Maybe the police got it.”
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy LV Hong, who was clearly upset that his authority had been disregarded. Not only had an unauthorized robbery taken place in his territory, but he knew the owner of the jewelry store. “This thing make me look bad,” he complained.
Tinh and the others knew that few gang members respected LV Hong. Unlike Amigo, his predecessor, LV was the strong-arm type, often threatening other gang members to keep them in line. Some felt he had been flown in from Texas by David Thai precisely for that reason.
Now, two days later, LV Hong was mercilessly whacking the hell out of Nigel.
“No, please,” Nigel pleaded between blows to the head, “I don’t have the gold. I didn’t take it.”
There were nearly a dozen gang members in the apartment at the time. Everyone sat or stood, awkwardly silent, avoiding eye contact.
LV picked up a clock radio from a nearby dresser, raised it high in the air and brought it crashing down on Nigel’s head. The radio shattered, sending pieces of plastic shooting across the bedroom floor.
Nigel still insisted, “I don’t have the gold.” This angered David Thai even more. Without warning, he stormed into the bedroom and began kicking Nigel, who had fallen to his knees on the floor.
“You lie, motherfuck! You lie!” screamed David, his reedy voice cracking with emotion. He kept pummeling Nigel, whose shirt was torn, his hair matted with blood.
Finally, a couple of gang members pulled Anh hai off. “No, Anh hai, we take care a this,” advised Shadow Boy. David Thai walked back into the front room where Tinh Ngo stood transfixed by the mayhem.
“Sit down,” David ordered Tinh.
Tinh sat.
“You know why we beat this guy?” David asked.
“Why?”
“’Cause yesterday I go to Canal Street and I almost get arrested. I almost get arrested ’cause this guy rob the jewelry store and he don’t let anybody know.”
While David Thai fumed, LV Hon
g stomped into the kitchen and returned to the bedroom holding a wooden cutting board. He began beating Nigel with the solid cedar board, smacking him again and again.
Tinh winced each time the cutting board slammed into Nigel’s skull with a loud whuuump!
“I know this motherfucker couldn’t be trusted,” David Thai said to Tinh. “I know he couldn’t be trusted ’cause he not one of us, okay? He not Vietnamese.”
Tinh nodded. Initially, he wondered why David Thai was making such a grand display of this beating. Now it was clear.
To the BTK, Nigel was an outsider. He’d been born and raised on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, though his parents were originally from India. In 1988, when Nigel was just fifteen years old, his family emigrated to New York City. The Jagmohans initially lived in Brooklyn, then moved to the Bronx, where Nigel began hanging out with a group of Vietnamese and Cambodian teenagers he met at Skate Key, a local roller-skating rink. Soon Nigel was making trips to Canal Street to scheme and commit crimes with his newfound friends.
Nigel wasn’t the only non-Vietnamese youth to become associated with the BTK. The gang was a loose enough confederation that almost anyone who took part in crimes with gang members on a semi-regular basis could call himself BTK. There were Cambodians in the gang, and a few Chinese. There were many Amerasians, some partly of African American descent. There were even a few Puerto Rican and Dominican teenagers who helped out with BTK crimes in the Bronx.
Non-Vietnamese members were allowed to join in robberies and home invasions. They may even have been allowed to associate themselves publicly with the gang. (Nigel, for instance, had attended Amigo’s funeral and was present during the cemetery shootout in Linden, New Jersey.) But for those gang members who could not speak Vietnamese, the gang’s inner sanctums would always be beyond their reach. And as outsiders, they were the first to come under suspicion when things went wrong.
American Gangsters Page 83